Tetsumi Kudo, Cultivation of Nature and People Who Are Looking at It , 1970 –1971, photography by Jessica Eckert. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth and Andrea Rosen Gallery
Setting foot inside the warped world of Tetsumi Kudo feels a little like being dropped off at a disconcerting children’s play centre. Inhabiting Hauser & Wirth London’s North gallery, the floors and walls are covered in bare-foot friendly astroturf, and littered with technicolour dice and fluorescent plants. Look closer though, and the surreal playroom swerves into the stuff of nightmares.
Tetsumi Kudo, Your Portrait – R , 1965 – 1966, photography by Jessica Eckert. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth and Andrea Rosen Gallery
In Kudo’s garden, any promise of pleasure fast dissolves. Plants melt and merge with alien entities. Cast penises sprout alongside disembodied hands (“Greffe ’72”, 1972), or twist unerotically in chains (“Human Bonsai – Freedom of Deformity – Deformity of Freedom”, 1978). Like Bosch’s famous triptych, there are animals, plants, nakedness – but the shadow of ruin has passed overhead.
A distinctive figure in the happenings scene of the Sixties, Kudo came of age in the relatively stable era following America’s occupation of Japan. The economy was in recovery and politics had settled. Japan was in a process of metamorphosis, emerging anew in the wake of the catastrophic annihilation it suffered in World War Two. Rather than offer unalloyed hope to the artist, Kudo – like many in his generation – felt deeply sceptical. Japan’s atomic wounds were still fresh.
Tetsumi Kudo, Your Portrait, 1966, photography by Jessica Eckert. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth and Andrea Rosen Gallery
The Hauser & Wirth show, though small, provides a concise and informative entry into Kudo’s ouevre. On the left, you encounter a series of his domed vitrines – small terrariums of terror where plastic insects crawl over prickly plants and hunks of hair. These are perhaps the most visceral expression of Kudo’s post-nuclear disillusionment, and the product of his growing concern about the toxic corruption of Japan’s natural world. Like Beuys’ vitrines, which assemble congealed blood and limbs, they are the wretched still life left by war.
Tetsumi Kudo, Your Portrait (exterior), 1966, photography by Jessica Eckert. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth and Andrea Rosen Gallery
Across the room, in Kudo’s cube series, the great explosions over Nagasaki and Hiroshima reverberate in a different way. Each box is a painted dice opened on one side to expose carefully curated chaos within. A mess of wires, more hands, another penis, a temperature gauge, a clock. Instead of a ghastly elegy for nature, Kudo sings a sarcastic paean for technology’s control. We are left guessing the role that’s left for chance. Does the dice dictate the next move? Or the machinery within?
Tetsumi Kudo, Your Portrait – F, 1963, photography by Jessica Eckert. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth and Andrea Rosen Gallery
The two series (man-made and man-destroyed) bracket the space, while in the middle there are two enclosed gardens of their own. One, a huge dice, “Garden of the Metamorphosis in the Space Capsule” (1968), unites the two sides of the room, revealing giant flowers and scattered orphan body parts inside. Lit by a dim neon light, it’s the first of Kudo’s works that has a sort of recognisable beauty, albeit of the macabre kind. It’s another of his unreal worlds, but softer. “For nostalgic purpose”, shimmers a neon green sign with queasy irony.
Tetsumi Kudo, Graft ’72 , 1972, photography by Jessica Eckert. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth and Andrea Rosen Gallery
Given its obsession with the grotesque, it’s surprising that Kudo believed the chrysalis best represented his artistic philosophy. It’s too delicate, too sentimental to fit with the nausea he provokes. It does, however, suggest something about change in all its different guises. Like with any great storyteller, when you step out of the world Kudo creates, a new light is cast on the one outside. Creativity is nothing if not transformative.
Tetsumi Kudo is on show at Hauser & Wirth London, North Gallery, until 21 November 2015
Text by Imogen Greenlagh